If you spend your time saying "it can never happen" while occupying a position to make it more likely to happen, you're part of the problem. - Briahna Joy Gray

It's hard to define "progressive" but it seems to me you shouldn't label yourself as such if you don't think that decent housing and healthcare and food etc are human rights.

With respect to the Democratic National Convention, you know, I think the party is sending a very clear signal about whose votes they are reaching for and whose they aren’t. They have John Kasich, who is a Republican and who has attempted to pass some of the most draconian anti-abortion laws in the state of Ohio, in a prime spot, when there was news for a while that suggested that they weren’t even going to allow AOC to speak. Of course, they now have. But they have made gestures like barring The Young Turks, one of the preeminent lefty news organizations, from having a press pass to a digital event. Why you would do that, other than to send a kind of signal to progressives that you’re not interested in their vote, I don’t know. So, it’s a really curious choice. It feels again like it’s 2016, and there is a dynamic being set up where there is a kind of wanton disregard for the values and interests of what is coming up to be the new base, the insurgent left wing of the party, the part of the party that just celebrated the victory of Cori Bush last week and Jamaal Bowman and Mondaire Jones. And it is telling that the only people under the age of 40 — under the age of 50, rather, who are speaking at this event are AOC and Pete Buttigieg.

What you’ve seen in this latest slate of picks is a lot of emphasis on the identity of the individuals picked, a lot of firsts in the group. And even folks with less — or less, shall we say, more attenuated relationships to traditional identity characters have gone as far as to talk about the struggles of their stepfather’s family, right? And I think that’s very intentional, because substantively several of these individuals have real problems, and none of them truly represents a progressive in the mindset of most Americans, especially those who identified with Bernie Sanders. And Neera Tanden is someone, in particular, who was very notorious for being openly antagonistic of Senator Sanders, who, again, represented the largest coalition of progressive voters in this country